I wondered myself. But I was soon to know. Mr. Paine read on:
“‘I give and bequeath the above to my niece, Mary Blyth, on these conditions. She is to live in the house at 84, Camford Street. She is never to sleep out of it. She is never to be away from it after nine o’clock at night or before nine o’clock in the morning. She is only to have one companion, and she must be a woman. They are to have no visitors, neither she nor her companion. She is to choose a companion, and stick to her. If the companion dies, or leaves her, she is not to have another. She is afterwards to live in the house alone. She is not to let any woman, except her companion, enter the house. She is not to allow any man, under any circumstances whatever, to come inside the house, or to cross the doorstep. These are my wishes and orders. If she disobeys any one of them, then may my curse light on her, and I will see that it does, and the house, and the income, and everything, is to be taken from her, and given to the Society for Befriending Sailors.
“‘Signed, Benjamin Batters.’”
“That, Miss Blyth, is what purports to be your uncle’s will.”
“But,” I gasped, “what is that at the end about stopping in the house, and letting no one come in, and all the rest of it?”
“Those are the conditions on which you are to inherit. Before, however, touching on them I should like to point out in what respect the will seems to me to be most irregular. First of all, it is undated. There could hardly be a more serious flaw. There is nothing to show if it was made last week or fifty years ago. In the interim all sorts of things may have happened to render it null and void. Then a signature to a will requires two witnesses; this has none. Then the wording is extremely loose. For instance, should you fail to fulfil certain conditions, the property is to pass to the Society for Befriending Sailors. So far as I can learn there is no such society. Societies for befriending sailors there are in abundance, but there is not one of that exact name, and it would become a moot point which one of them the testator had in his mind’s eye.”
“All of which amounts to—what?”
“Well, it amounts to this. You can receive the money referred to, and live in the house in question, at your own risk, until someone comes forward with a better title. It will not need a very good title, I am sorry to say, Miss Blyth, to be better than that which is conferred on you by this document. I am not saying this by way of advice, but simply as a statement of the case as it appears to me.”
“What I want to know is, what’s the meaning of those conditions? I suppose, by the way, there is such a house.”
“There certainly is. Camford Street is an old, and not particularly reputable street, one end of which leads into the Westminster Bridge Road. No. 84 is in a terrace. From the exterior—which is as much as I have seen of it—it looks as if it had not been occupied for a considerable period of time. Indeed, according to the neighbours, no one has lived in it for, some say ten, others fifteen, and others twenty years.”